Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1

Francesco Vezzoli’s Art Show Hits a Snag

The church packed for its planned trip to New York.Credit
Alfonso Di Vincenzo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It was a typically elaborate, provocative move by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli in a career full of them: He had contracted to buy the ruins of an old deconsecrated church in the southern Italian town of Montegiordano and had planned to ship them to New York, brick by brick, for exhibition in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. His videos would be shown inside.

But “The Church of Vezzoli,” as the exhibition was to be called, was canceled Monday in the midst of a legal imbroglio in Italy; some of the ruins now sit in containers at the Port of Gioia Tauro, while others lie stacked in plastic at the chapel site, on an estate in Calabria.

Local prosecutors are evaluating whether Mr. Vezzoli was trying to export items of artistic and cultural value without authorization, a crime carrying a fine or jail time up to four years. No formal charges have been filed against him, but they could come later.

“All of a sudden, it all exploded, and I feel I was hit by a tornado,” said Mr. Vezzoli, 42, from his home Milan. “I’m in a state of shock.”

Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, said he had learned of the troubles from Mr. Vezzoli about six weeks ago and that the museum has been left scrambling. “Part of curating is to come up with new ideas — and I started this morning,” Mr. Biesenbach said on Friday.

Mr. Vezzoli, a native of Brescia, Italy, is used to a high level of celebrity and he has been known for his cheekiness in addressing religion in his art. His 2011 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, “Sacrilegio,” featured images of weeping Madonnas, each with the superimposed face of a supermodel, including Cindy Crawford’s.

His best-known work, the 2005 film “Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula,” featured Helen Mirren, Courtney Love and a fleet of barely clad actors. In 2006, he made himself the subject of a fake version of an E! channel “True Hollywood Story” show that purported to detail his own scandalous behavior.

Now, a real potential scandal is nipping at his heels.

Mr. Vezzoli said that he identified the Montegiordano ruins, about 300 miles southeast of Rome, a year and a half ago, and went about contracting to buy what he called “a skeleton of a building” for around $100,000 from the owner, who had built a new church in front of the old one. The artist said that he had the blessing of the town’s mayor.

“It was falling down the hill,” he said. “We almost felt we were doing some good.”

The deconstruction process had been going on for six months when, in late October, a passer-by wrote to complain to the Ministry of Culture, and the superintendent in charge of the Calabria region blocked it.

Mr. Vezzoli’s lawyer, Massimo Sterpi, argued that in an examination of the estate in 1988, the regional superintendent had not found the church to have cultural or historical value as a monument. But Francesco Prosperetti, the current art superintendent of Calabria, said on Monday, “Under Italian law, the owners should have asked for an authorization to remove the decorative elements from any historic building,” regardless of cultural value.

Mr. Sterpi, the lawyer, says that the artist is not even the legal owner of the ruins. Mr. Vezzoli’s preliminary contract stipulates that the deal is final only when the church is dismantled, provided that the building had already been deemed free of any restriction on legal, religious or national heritage grounds.

“We never managed to sign the final contract,” Mr. Sterpi said, adding that the export process had not been initiated because the ruins were not entirely dismantled. “I am confident that Mr. Vezzoli will prove his innocence and good faith,” he said. “However, the show is over.”

Mr. Vezzoli said that the decision about the church’s status as a possible artistic treasure would take at least four months.

“Even if we win, it’s a Pyrrhic victory,” he said. “We won’t need it by then.”

The MoMA PS1 show was meant to be the third leg of “The Trinity,” a multicity retrospective of Mr. Vezzoli’s work. “Galleria Vezzoli” just ended this past weekend at the Maxxi museum of contemporary art in Rome. “Cinema Vezzoli” is now scheduled to open in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Mr. Biesenbach said he and Mr. Vezzoli would meet to look for a new way to show his works at the museum later in 2014. But Mr. Vezzoli said he was not ready to consider another building.

“It’s like love — if this church turns you down, you can’t fall in love again right away,” he said. “My Juliet is being kept captive.”

Mr. Biesenbach suggested that the legal troubles, while unfortunate, dovetailed in some strange way with Mr. Vezzoli’s work. He added that the controversy had aspects of “a real-time performance.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Not So Fast: Italian Church Is Halted on Its Way to PS1. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe